Sunday, December 20, 2009

Some years ago in Bangui, I met a man from Obo. He had been working for an ill-fated American anti-poaching militia and was involved in untold drama: he'd accused his colleague, a South African mercenary, of embezzlement (diamonds, LandCruisers), who then accused him of murder, and he spent half a year in prison. Near the end of our conversation, he pulled out some photos of a corpse in the shallows on the banks of a river. The body was bloated, pummeled, and dismembered. “You Europeans don't believe it, but it is a very real problem for us – crocodile men. They are men who transform themselves into crocodiles and kill people in the water.”

I didn't have time to ask more then, but the image of the corpse and my interlocutor's grave mien – even graver than when he described his rivalry with the South African – as he talked of the crocodile men stayed with me.

Evans-Pritchard, meanwhile, in his extensive work on Azande notions of witchcraft and magic, makes no mention of the “pili” (crocodile men). So I was curious to find out more while out in Obo. The problem of crocodile men dates to the early 1980s, when many Yakoma functionaries were assigned to posts here. The president at the time, Andre Kolingba, was a Yakoma, an ethnic group concentrated in riverine areas near the capital, and his loading of the civil service with his kin marked the beginning of the ethnicization of CAR politics.

Many Yakoma are fishermen, and pili developed as a strategy to increase catches. A man who takes the pili medicine, imbibed under guidance of a magician, gains the strength to stay underwater all day and finds all the biggest fish. Only, it can be used for ill as well; pili can also employ these superhuman skills to slay a foe, provided the foe is in the water. As Yakoma moved into Obo, they mingled with the Azande living there and the pili skills passed between friends. Very often, crocodile murders involve rivalries over women.

The pili problem reached its height in 87 – 96. It felt like an epidemic to residents, who sought out and sanctioned any suspected pili in their midst. The usual practice was burning accused crocodile men at the stake. As the flames began to lick at their bodies, they would denounce others. For a while, the Catholic mission stopped giving communion out of exasperation with its members' excitement for the crocodile-men-burning.

Few Yakoma remain in Obo, as indeed few functionaries at all remain. The crocodile men problem has abated too. (Now, ill will is enacted upon others through inflicting sickness, a sickness that resembles AIDS but is not AIDS because it kills people so much more quickly than the doctors say AIDS usually kills, explained one interlocutor. Incidentally, there is no functioning hospital in Obo, so any opportunistic infections would go pretty much untreated.)

But there was one big crocodile man case last year. A boy from the nearby village of Gugbere came to Obo for a soccer tournament. In the afternoon, he and his friends headed home, but found themselves blocked by the ferry, which was at the far side of the river. Undeterred, the young man jumped in and began swimming to pull back the barge that would bring them home. Halfway across, he began yelling, “They've gotten me! The crocodile men have me! You will never see me again!” His head and torso emerged from the water, as if propelled, once, twice, three times, and then he disappeared.

People searched for his body for four days before they found it. The internal organs and the penis had been cut out. People understood them to have been eaten. Investigations ensued, and three men were accused of the killing: the boy's cousin, a man from Sudan, and a boy from the neighborhood. They confessed to being pili and killing the boy. The man from Sudan was the ringleader, in a way. He had been paid by a patron in Sudan. The patron had lived in Obo until the UN decided to repatriate Sudanese refugees a few years ago. He had his eye on a girl in Obo, but the girl thought him too old and preferred the soccer playing boy. So the patron dispatched his associate to deal with the rival. The associate paid the boy's cousin and another young man to help him.

The three accused sat in detention at the gendarmerie. But an angry mob yelling passages from the Bible (an eye for an eye) led by the murdered boy's mother broke down the door and killed all three. Their bodies now repose in a cemetery established by a Colonel who ruled as prefet of Obo a few years ago. This colonel is remembered as a particularly effective leader, because he could see through people to tell who was bad and who was good, a skill enhanced by his drinking, according to local lore, and he quickly dispatched the bad to his cemetery.

While in Obo, I read a novella by Mark Twain called The Mysterious Stranger. The story takes place in modern-day Austria sometime around the 1600s, a period marked by witch scares. The narrator, a young boy, enjoys a privileged view of the world thanks to repeated visits from the titular stranger, who describes himself as Satan. Satan enables his young friend to see the future and shows him how little humans understand about good and bad – early death might in fact obviate years of suffering; madness may bring greater happiness than sanity. What emerges clearly, through the witch burnings and unexpected changes in people's lives, is the ridiculousness of human efforts to make order out of the evil forces they see in the world. By the end of the story, Satan reveals to the boy that none of it exists. Not the boy, not himself; all is but a ripple, a sigh, a joke of the universe. A kind postmodern tale, a product of its brilliantly irreverent author. And yet, immersed in my own tales of crocodile men scares (not to mention LRA depravities), which have a social truth as well as a physical truth and yet are founded in what are, to a logical-rational mind, untruths, somehow it struck me as hopeful.

Saturday, December 5, 2009

I arrived back in Bangui last Tuesday night after a fourteen-hour drive down the rutted dirt roads from Ndele. Thursday morning my cell phone's chirpy T-Mobile ring woke me: had I heard that Ndele was under siege? I immediately starting ringing up friends there to see if they were OK and find out more about what was happening. The Sisters sounded tired to the point of being unable to even talk – due, I surmised, not just to the attack itself but also to the fatigue of living twelve years in a place, hoping to see it progress, and being so often let down. The NGO workers were tensely waiting in their compounds and rightly jealous of their dwindling cell phone batteries. And Al-Habib, my fruit buyer/hustling-merchant/friend, was curious and headed out to see things up close.

The attack was over by the end of the day. The rebels – for it was members of the rebel group that controls the road north from Ndele who had attacked – left, carrying their 26 wounded and two prisoner gendarmes with them. Reinforcements from the Central African armed forces (FACA) arrived the following day. They abused a few people (and killed two wounded rebels) but avoided the large-scale exactions for which they have become notorious. Entry and exit to the town remains closely guarded, and the market stopped functioning for quite a few days as much of the population had fled into the bush.

Can I admit to a strange mix of feelings about hearing of all this from the safety of Bangui? My first reaction was relief that I had made it out before all this came to pass. My second approached guilt – I should be there experiencing it all, too, rather than ensconced in the comparative luxury of the capital, with its (occasional) hot water and cafes. After all, the danger was likely minimal for people who stayed in their homes, more or less out of harm's way. As an anthropologist, I'm supposed to live close to the population and and not erect a protective bubble between myself and the hardships they face. But studying an area home to violent conflict makes that more difficult because, quite frankly, when it comes down to it, I value my life more highly than my research. Unlike in the calculations of altruists like Zell Kravinsky, who argued that the risk of complications in his donation of a healthy kidney (which his wife opposed) was far outweighed by the benefit to the recipient, there would likely be little direct benefit to people in Ndele as a result of me “being there” alongside them as the bullets flew.

Tomorrow I head out again: to the far southeast, site of LRA attacks for the past couple of years, if all goes as planned (still awaiting final confirmation of our departure). We will go to Obo, the last town before the Sudanese border, where the president will alight on Thursday for the Journée Mondiale de l'Alimentation et de la Femme Rurale (World Food and Rural Women Day). Each year, the president picks some far-off, neglected corner of his realm to visit for World Food Day. The road is repaired for the occasion (the road to Ndele benefited from this treatment two years ago), and the president gives a speech reminding people of the state in which they live. I imagine that food is distributed as well. (Time and again here, people have illustrated avowals of the virtue of a leader through reference to the food he hands out. The World Food Programme, however, is generally seen as stingy – haven't quite figured that out yet.)

On the way, we will pass through Bangassou, Zemio, and Rafai, all formerly sites of sultanates who were employed by concessionary companies in the early 20th century. The majority of the population is Azande – I'm hoping I'll be able to thumb through my E.E. Evans-Pritchard as we bump along the roads.

About this blog:

An anthropologist's take on political theory - the state, sovereignty, and their boundaries and frontiers. Full explanation here.

Research described on this blog has been supported by grants from the NSF, Wenner-Gren, SSRC, USIP and Duke University, but the views expressed here are the responsibility of none but the author herself .

About Me

I am an assistant professor of anthropology at Yale University. Previously I was a Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in the department of geography at the University of California, Berkeley. I earned my PhD in cultural anthropology from Duke University.